The invention relates to agricultural equipment suitable for gathering plants and stalks, compacting them into rope- or sausage-shape and cutting the rope or sausage into wafers of a predetermined thickness and length.
It has long been proposed to compress green or dried forage, such as maize, alfalfa, or sorghum, into compact lumps in order to save storage space and to make it easy to handle while using it as cattle fodder. This method is preferable to storing and feeding green or dried fodder in loose bulk, and, incidentally, it is well known that cattle prefer hard wafers to loose, finely comminuted forage.
It has been tried in the past to compress forage as hay--after its cutting, drying, and collecting, by mechanical equipment--between rotating rollers which were arranged in the implement with the rollers positioned at right angles to the direction of travel of the equipment; however, the results were poor, the hay was not sufficiently compacted, and the energy requirement was too high. As a result implements of this kind were not adapted for general use.
One should distinguish between two different purposes for uprooting, cutting and compacting plant parts: there is, in the first place, cattle forage which is, at present, cut, dried and stored as bales, or in natural shape, and, secondly, there are stalks and roots of plants left in the field after the crop has been gathered, which are uprooted and generally used as fertilizers for the next crop.
Hay is collected by forage combines which comprise cutters and elevator means for transporting the cut plants into storage bins which travel together with the equipment. The latter are exchanged for empty containers as soon as they are filled. It is a fact that, instead of storing the loose material, it is time- and space-saving to store densely compacted, relatively small lumps of hay which are easily digested by the cattle.
Equipment for recycling cotton stock or other roots and stalks, comprises rotating rollers, wheels, and/or fast travelling rubber belts serving to extract the plant from the soil, conveyors for lifting the uprooted material into a shredder where they are finely chopped, and means for conveying the shredded material into storage bins or for spreading them on the ground. These machines are heavy and rather unwieldy, while their energy requirements, especially those of the shredders, are very high.
For these reasons it is the object of the present invention to provide a plant-compacting device which can be attached to, or mounted on, conventional--or specially constructed - agricultural equipment such as forage harvesters or cotton stock uprooters, which should compact the uprooted or cut plant parts into cylindrical rope- or sausage-shape and cut the resulting cylinder into discs or wafers of a required length.
It is another object to provide such equipment at low cost, and it is a further, very important object that the equipment should produce the wafers as an end product with a low energy consumption.